From the prior art, a variety of conveyor belt scrapers are known. These particularly serve to clean conveyor belts at the drum or immediately behind the drum on the track during operation. The most cost-efficient method for cleaning the conveyor belt is performed automatically, that is, a scraper is pressed against the circulating conveyor belt via a spring element, whereby the adhering dirt is separated off by the scraper and deflected to one side. In this course, depending on the application purpose or the magnitude of the press-on force required, different principles are used for providing the press-on force of the scraper on the conveyor belt.
Frequently, a plurality of flexible scraping elements are used, for example, across the width of the conveyor belt, which are vertically moved during assembly so far in the direction of the conveyor belt that said elements flexibly deform and thus apply a press-on force to the conveyor belt. However, the scraping elements have to be mounted very elaborately at several points to the carrier of the conveyor belt scraper or the carrier requires a particular labor-intensive construction which increases manufacturing costs.
Furthermore, in these scraper elements that use a spring made of steel there is a risk that in operation their resonant frequency is reached very quickly due to the contact with the moving conveyor belt so that their use is limited to a particular range of speed.
Conveyor belt scrapers having a torsional element for returning the scraper to the conveyor belt represent an alternative for generating the press-on force by means of deformable scraping elements in which either a spring or torsional springs is/are tensioned due to the vertical displacement of the scraper in the direction of the conveyor belt via an articulated lever and thus provides the press-on force of the scraper. DE 38 31 033 C2, for example, shows a cleaning device for a conveyor belt which stores an introduced force by means of four torsional spring elements disposed between a blade holder and a pipe and converts it into a press-on force for the scraper. A disadvantage of this device is the fact that the press-on force varies in dependence of the material property of the torsional spring elements, which, particularly when several scrapers are used, leads to non-uniform wear behavior of the scrapers across the width of the conveyor belt. Moreover, the construction of the scraper requires a plurality of components which makes assembly laborious and manufacture correspondingly expensive.